In recent years, satellite based location systems have come into general use which are able to determine the location of a device incorporating the location system with very great accuracy. As well as being incorporated into specialist navigation devices, such satellite based location systems are routinely included in smartphones and similar mobile communication and/or general purpose computing devices.
The use of geometric numerical coordinates to identify locations, such as latitude and longitude coordinates or grid references, is well known, and satellite based location systems generally identify locations using such numerical coordinates. For example, the GPS system identifies locations using GPS coordinates, which are commonly presented as high resolution latitude and longitude coordinates.
One practical problem with using numerical coordinates to identify locations is that the resulting strings of numbers are very user unfriendly for users. In practice people generally find that strings of numbers are difficult to accurately remember or communicate verbally to others. Further, accurately manually inputting strings of numbers into a device, for example to tell a navigation device where you wish to go, or to incorporate a location into a message sent to another person, can be relatively slow and time consuming.
In some cases locations are identified using other means such as post codes or street names, possibly together with building numbers, but these approaches suffer from the problem that they may be relatively inaccurate and are generally only assigned to buildings. In particular, post codes are generally only assigned to locations where it is expected that post will be delivered or picked up. As a result, these approaches are often only useful in urban areas where a high density of suitable codes, names and numbers have been assigned. Further, post codes are not necessarily any easier to remember and communicate verbally than numerical coordinates. Further, different countries or regions use different systems for identifying addresses, and many of these address systems are relatively unsophisticated and of limited value for identifying or communicating specific locations.
Preferably the present method and apparatus address this problem.